Winter in Wartime

Winter in Wartime (Oorlogswinter, 2008) is a Dutch-Belgian war drama directed by Martin Koolhoven that you can watch online on iFILM, starring Martijn Lakemeier alongside Yorick van Wageningen and Jamie Campbell Bower.

The setting is the freezing winter of 1944–45, western Netherlands under German occupation and deep in a famine. Fourteen-year-old Michiel chafes against his father, the mayor, who walks a careful line with the occupiers to keep things from getting worse. When Michiel stumbles on a wounded British airman hiding in the woods, he takes it on himself to protect the man — with help from his uncle Ben, who has connections to the Dutch underground and a secret Michiel isn't ready for.

Based on Jan Terlouw's novel, long considered a staple of Dutch youth literature, the film takes a coming-of-age story and puts genuine moral weight behind it. Koolhoven refuses the clean lines of wartime heroism: the adults Michiel admires keep surprising him in ways that hurt. The result is a war film that works precisely because it stays close to one boy's limited, slowly collapsing view of what the people around him are actually doing. Stream Winter in Wartime (2008) online on iFILM.